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EASTON, Md.  John Roberts has received his official welcome to
the political fishbowl. Opponents of his appointment to the U.S. Supreme
Court lately have accused him of hating women, blacks, poor people, the
disabled, trees, certain grasses, virtually all feral beasts and
grandmothers. This would make Roberts the King of all Angry White Males 
crazier than David Duke himself.

But there is more. Inquiring journalists also report that
Roberts attends mass regularly, and that he and his wife have adopted two
children.

It promises to get sillier when Roberts' confirmation hearings
begin next week. Democrats apparently consider Roberts a stealth menace,
since 80,000 pages of documents have failed to expose him as a real one.
Sen. Patrick Leahy branded him a "radical" because Roberts doesn't look,
act, write or rule like one, while left-wing law professor Cass Sunstein has
recommended a Judiciary Committee Inquisition to secure some sort of
confession from the young judge.

Activist groups on the left also say they smell a rat because
they don't smell a rat. NARAL has spent upward of a million dollars on ads
that depict Roberts as the murderous foe of women, only to pull the
advertisements because even NARAL's friends were offended by their sheer
dishonesty.

Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian
Task Force, then duly accused Roberts of promoting "a political and legal
ideology that is antithetical to an America that embraces all, including
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people ... a mortal danger to equal
rights for gay people, reproductive freedom and affirmative action."

Environmentalists bastinadoed the candidate because he didn't go
along with using the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution to
protect the arroyo toad. Roberts pointed out that you can't use the commerce
clause because the toad lives only in one state, California.

Feminists grabbed their ropes and torches because Roberts
blasted the discredited theory of "comparable worth," while opposing sexual
quotas for everything from hiring to firing. Journalist Dahlia Lithwick even
dubbed him a "woman hater" on the basis of a newspaper piece Roberts
penned  as a high school junior.

Other claims against the man include the fact that he attended
an elite prep school and didn't spend enough time with people of color,
which would place him in solid company with seven of the other eight
justices. And don't forget that in a draft of a 1983 article ghostwritten
for Ronald Reagan, Roberts suggested substituting the phrase, "The War
Between the States," for, "the Civil War."

If these attacks don't betoken a political nervous breakdown,
nothing does. Even though Roberts' detractors have tens of millions of
dollars to spend demonizing the guy, they can't afford to discuss the only
two things that matter: his record and the Constitution.

That because the left's one nonnegotiable demand  the
extension of privacy rights at the expense of tradition  bids to become a
full-blown laughingstock. The "right" traces back to what Justice William O.
Douglas called penumbras sprouting from emanations sprouting from the Bill
of Rights  which is about as nutty a formulation as one can find in the
entire history of American Constitutional writ.

Yet Douglas' Penumbras and Emanations conjury had one very
dangerous side effect. It persuaded justices that they no longer had to
honor legal texts, precedents or the separation of powers. They could do
whatever they wanted, on anything from the definition of marriage to
property rights  and if American legal literature wouldn't justify the
power grab, they could use other justifications, such as penumbras,
emanations or decisions by foreign courts.

Enter Roberts, who believes in linguistic and legal rigor, and
doesn't suffer fools gladly (as when he described a girl who purported to
sell 10,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies as "the little huckster"). His seems
to take written law very seriously, and doesn't feel he may remake society
to his liking. More importantly, he could talk sense to fellow justices
whose recent forays into politics have invited angry recriminations from the
public.

In a fitting bit of irony, the uncivil rebellion loosed by Edward
Kennedy's "Robert Bork's America" speech 18 years ago now bids to consume
its instigators. Not only have Roberts' critics gone overboard in seeking
ways to demonize the man. They also have staked their careers on something
decidedly un-democratic  a demand that the Supreme Court receive cart
blanche to impose cultural changes people abhor and on which the
Constitution stands silent, while overturning reforms Americans consider
necessary and just.

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